1) Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
My brother already saw a midnight screening on Wednesday before flying out this weekend, but he's the kind of geek who's gonna see it multiple times, so I went with him for his 2nd and my first viewing last night. I'm not a huge SW fan but I figure if I'm gonna see it eventually I should see it in a theater. Of course, we got there during trailers and had to sit in the 2nd row staring straight up at the screen right in front of our faces, but it was still cool. I was satisfied with all the light saber battles and General Grevious was pretty cool and McGregor definitely stepped his game up and became a focal point. It occurred to me that SW/Lucas has a weird fixation with severed limbs, especially hands. And even with the PG-13 rating there was still a strange lack of blood spurting. Go fig. The best part of my long, boring graduation ceremony was that at the very end as everyone filed out, the orchestra started playing the Darth Vader theme music, which was pretty cool to hear while I was walking around dressed in a long black robe.

2) End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
On Friday I was about to go to bed and was channel flipping between Conan and some other stuff and was pleasantly surprised to come across this playing on PBS, of all places, and stayed up to watch the whole thing. It's fascinating but also kind of depressing to hear their story told from such an insider perspective, so different to what I'm used to hearing or reading about them. Less mythologization about how they invented punk and so on (although there's plenty of that too) and more of the actual band members' perspective. The depressing part was finding out how much they fought and stole each other's girlfriends and hated each other, which kind of shatters the illusion of them as a unified front, this gang of guys who dress alike and go by the same last name and stayed together for years and years and years, which was always a big part of their appeal. But it makes for a great story, and it was told pretty well.

Labels: Movie Diary, movies

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23, 2005 at 11:57 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.